Welcome to Data-drop.com. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I just got off the phone with one of my clients asking if I still had a copy of her files from her laptop. 2 months ago she bought a brand new dell laptop with all the bells and whistles. After having for a week she started having problems booting into windows vista. She brought it to me to check it out. What I found surprised me a little. The hard drive had bad sectors and when it would read from the drive it would click and tap something fierce. After spending two hours on the phone with them and reformatting the system twice they deemed the hard drive as bad. I received the new drive preformatted with windows vista already loaded. That was convenient, no more reloading software once I received it. Even with the drive clicking and taping I was still able to recover all of her information.

So I get this phone call this afternoon about her data. She went to college about a week ago, and today had trouble booting it up again. She called me and I asked about the clicking noise and she said there was none. It would boot all the way into windows and then puke with a blue screen. I told her we would have to boot into safe mode and try and repair it. She said she would call me back once she had it in safe mode. About an hour went by and that’s when she called back. Apparently she didn’t want to bother me so she called dell support. The first thing they asked her to do is take the repair option. That didn’t work. So the next step they asked her to do a full system recovery. She asked if they could back up her data, that’s when dell told her that it they couldn’t backup her information. It was lost, and there was nothing they could do about it. Honestly what gives dell the right to tell their customers that there data is lost. I’m really disappointed in what they have done.

About a month ago same scenario a new customer calls me and asks where to buy an external hard drive. Her computer wouldn’t boot so she called dell support. She inquired about backing up her data. The dell representative told her to go buy a USB hard drive to back everything up. He told her that they could do it remotely through the internet with no problem even told her what size hard drive to get. I inquired about where the machine was stopping on bootup. Apparently the machine would blue screen and reboot constantly. How in the hell were they going to back up their data? They weren’t. going to. I went to visit them the night she was to call dell back. I sat in on the phone call to protect the Gigs of personal pictures and home movies.

We call dell and get right through he has us find her restore cds. We inquired again about backing up the data. He said oh yes go ahead and plug in your external hard drive. So I plugged in the drive I brought along. He said please hold while I connect. He put us on hold for about 10 minutes and came on to say that everything was backed up on the USB hard drive. No activity light on the drive and the computer rebooted at least 3 times while he has us on hold. What is this bullshit, really bait the user into thinking you would backup their data and then lie to them. I called him right there on the spot. I asked to speak to his supervisor and was promptly disconnected. What a bunch of Shit. I want some answers along with this post I am emailing support today. I will post the responses I get to my inquiries.

As for Dell, I used to recommend them, but for now I think I won’t.

If anyone has been backed into this same position please comment below or use the contact form on this site.  I am willing to help anyone that they’re trying this with.